Structural health monitoring of bridges via energy harvesting sensor nodes

This paper deals with the application of novel sensing technologies to an existing Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system for bridges. A vibration based SHM algorithm already in use to detect the structural performance degradation of a suspension highway bridge is modified to investigate the feasibility of replacing traditional wired accelerometers with state of the art wireless energy-harvesting sensors. The remodeled SHM algorithm benefits from the sensor nodes’ ability to support automated triggering and data pre-processing. The Random Decrement technique was included in the algorithm as a pre-processing tool to simultaneously reduce noise and amount of stored and transmitted data. Simulations based on available data were used to calibrate the triggering strategy, to verify the effectiveness of the data pre-processing, and to demonstrate power consumption improvements arising from the algorithm modification. © Bonessio et al.